


Author's Addition

by Kardon



Category: The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23370436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kardon/pseuds/Kardon
Summary: My take on the unfinished third ending for Man of Medan. Following the main story of the 'Flooded' ending as Brad, this is what would have happened if Julia breaks open the cargo hold door before Olson did.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Author's Addition

**Author's Note:**

> The Curator sat down in his chair, holding a teacup in one hand, a loose bundle of papers in the other. Setting the teacup down in a saucer on the table, he leaned forward to examine the pages with a more studied eye. On the desk in front of him was a medium sized teal book, with the title in gold lettering on the spine that read: Man of Medan.
> 
> Speaking in an almost cheerful tone, he said, "Well, now isn't this quite the surprise? It seems there has been," he paused for dramatic effect, " an addition to this story, one that is not-- or rather, has not been played out before. I'm quite delighted to see what you make of these new possibilities." leaning back in his seat, he continued, "I'll be watching, of course, from behind the scenes as I always do, but do not feel like I am expecting something of you here. This is the first time an addendum this large has been added in quite a while, and I am quite excited to see what possibilities occur. 
> 
> With a practiced hand the Curator guided the loose pages into the spine of the book near the back, and almost as if by magic, they fell into order. Turning several pages behind the new addition, he simply stated, "Wouldn't want to miss something, would we?" and the story began.

Brad  
Radio Room  
4:34 AM | June 21

The empty silence of the ship was deafening. He had to do something to fill it.

Glancing around the room, he dryly quipped, “This is just riveting.”

Brad chuckled at his own joke, trying to pass the time as he waited for any word from the others. It had been just over half an hour since Alex and Julia had gone down the hole, and he was growing worried and impatient. Even though Fliss was with him in the radio room, they had hardly said a word to each other since they sat down. After they had both almost died, it put a bit of a damper on conversation. 

He mumbled to himself, “Come on guys, where are you?” as he stood up to stretch. Somehow a seventy year old abandoned freighter didn’t have the most comfortable seats. “Who would have guessed,” he thought to himself. 

Suddenly a muffled shot rang out from under the deck, startling him from his reverie. He rushed over to the hole in the floor, turning around the corner with Fliss close behind him and called out, “Hey! Hey, what’s happening? Is everyone okay?” 

The only response was the tomb-like silence of the ship.

“Oh God, please be okay, please be okay.” His mind was racing with all the horrible possibilities, filled with worry for his brother and his future sister-in-law. His heart was racing but he knew he had to do something.

Brad sucked in a breath. “I gotta go after them!”

He turned to Fliss. “We’ve got to go down there and make sure everyone’s okay!”

“Shit,” she responded, “Well what’s our play?”

He shifted his feet. “I’ll find them, make sure they’re okay. You stay here with the radio.”

Fliss’ voice was unconvinced. She looked into the depths of the hole and shook her head. “There has to be a better idea.” 

Brad held up his hands in a gesture of reassurance. “I’m going to stay as far away from trouble as I can, and I’ll be back as soon as I find them.” The unspoken word, “alive” hung in the air. He turned to face the hole, and more to himself than Fliss, stuttered “It’ll-- it’ll be fine.”

He knew Fliss was unhappy with being left behind alone, but he also knew she wouldn’t put too much of a fight about it. Earlier in the night, as he was dropping down the grate to get the ladder, he had seen the look of relief on her face when he agreed to go down. After that he had seen the panic in her eyes through the locked grate despite the water droplets on his glasses as the lower room flooded, and then guilt as they kneeled in the crawlspace after the rest of the room flooded.

Still, Fliss was concerned for him. “Just keep your head down. Okay?” Brad nodded in response.

With Fliss’ word of wisdom in mind, he sat down at the edge of the worn metal hole. Alex and Julia’s fall earlier had taken most of the crumbling pieces of the floor with them, so the rim was fairly steady and held his weight. Grunting, he lowered himself down as far as his arms could reach, and dropped the last two feet down. Looking down at his hands, his palms were stinging. The edge of the hole might have been sturdy, but the worn metal was also coarse and rusty. 

Pushing up his glasses, Brad looked around him, investigating where he had ended up. It looked like an intersection with multiple paths to take. In front of him was a narrow hallway illuminated with a single mesh-covered light, with several pipes and valves sprouting from the wall and ceiling in front of it. Partially covering the ground in front of the hallway, and also about half of the narrow room he was in, was a larger hole, this one pitch black, with no way to tell how deep it was. It seemed to be a part of the staircase descending into it, with nothing but a worn handrail to tell what it was supposed to be, the stairs long since rusted and fallen apart. 

Turning around, behind him was another narrow hallway, this one much shorter and free of pipes. The corridor was empty, a dozen feet long, a door with a porthole at the end of it. He approached it and saw the glass was dirtied to an opaque black, and impossible to see through. The door itself was slightly warped, and when he tried it, the handle itself turned but the door itself was stuck tight, the frame solidly stuck. That was when he noticed something else odd about the door.

“That’s weird,” Brad mumbled to himself as he inspected the doorframe. There were about a dozen small marks on the door, each between an inch or two long. They stood out against the rest of the door, lighter in color and slightly deformed, as if something small but heavy had been slammed against the door. With a start he realized they were dents, but that discovery created more questions than it answered. 

“Why would there be dents on this random door in the lower deck? Who would do this? And why?” He whispered, thinking out loud. “Whatever. There are more important things to be worried about right now. Like Alex and Julia,” he remembered guiltily. He had already gotten sidetracked, and he needed to stay focused. “Buck up B-Boy,” he said to himself. “Buck up.” 

Since this door was a bust, he headed back to the hole, and ventured down the open hallway to the other side of the pit. He followed the corridor, and came to an intersection. The doorway on his right was blocked with a stack of wooden crates and debris, so he decided to go left. Brad turned and headed down the new hallway, but as he was passing a shallow alcove in the wall, a luminous figure appeared in the corner of his eye. He jumped and whirled around, looking for whatever it was that had frightened him. 

“It almost looked like Conrad,” he thought to himself, confused, “but that doesn’t make any sense. He isn’t even on the ship." Although he had missed Conrad’s hasty departure while hiding from the kidnappers, Fliss had filled Brad in on what he’d missed after they got out of the flooded hold. Apparently Conrad would have been shot if Alex hadn’t tackled Olson to buy him time to get away. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened otherwise.

“It doesn’t matter, just keep going,” Brad reassured himself. “You need to get to Alex and Julia before something bad happens.” So he moved forward. 

The hallway led to an open door on the right, the entrance to the next room. It seemed to be sleeping quarters, filled with cots suspended on chains from floor to ceiling. A pile of collapsed beds sat near the door, and as he walked past, plumes of dust flew up in his wake. The effect was unsettling. “I swear to God, if I make it through this, I’ll never even set foot on a paddle boat again,” he said quietly to himself.

Brad made his way past a row of lockers along the far wall, and found more cots. The chains on these ones had held up better, keeping the rows in straight lines. As he made his way through the room, something on the wall caught his attention, glinting in the dim light. He walked up to it, and realized it was an ornate painting, a faded golden frame around a worn but still distinct image. The painting itself depicted a man on a pile of boulders, standing strong against a raging sea. Oddly enough there were creatures emerging from the water, a group of winged monsters, demons, even. Above the roiling water were a wave of heavy gray clouds, an impending storm.

As he continued to examine it closer, Brad felt he couldn’t look away. Looking at it, something felt off. All of a sudden, he was seized by vertigo, and an unusual sense of falling. Then there was something thin and metallic blurring by him and without thinking, he grabbed it.

Suddenly the spell was broken, and he looked away feeling unsteady. The feeling quickly shifted into forgetfulness, and as he wandered away, a strange feeling of déjà vu.

He walked down the narrow rows between the cots, and saw a door set in the wall next to the grated lockers along the far wall. He tried the handle. It seemed to twist easily enough, so he opened the door. 

“Ah!”

A hanging corpse swung into his face as he opened the door, its skin a rotten color, eyes milky and white. The body was decked out in a blue navy uniform, faded and worn even in the darkness.

“I really, really don’t need this right now,” Brad said to himself and the corpse, and he made his way past it, now gently swinging from the disturbance. He emerged from the narrow doorway to find himself on a walkway, raised and tethered along the side wall of an open room. Walking over to the metal railing and resting his hands on it, he realized where he was and muttered to himself, “This looks familiar.”

It was the old cargo hold he had found Fliss in earlier while making his way into the ship alone. The room itself contained sparsely scattered piles of crates, a derelict jeep near the walkway he was on, and across the room, a smaller hold with a voice coming from behind a set of stacked wooden boxes. Across the room was the collapsed walkway, a portion of it still connected to make a convenient exit ramp. When they used to get out of the room afterwards, it had creaked ominously under their weight. He marked it off in his head as a potential escape route.

As Brad stood there, he realized the air was heavy with something. He hadn’t really paid attention to it before, a slight thickness to the air, but now that he had been recently outside the difference was staggering. Finding a gas mask in one of the old lockers had helped a little, but after the filter had filled up it was too hard to breathe through for any further use.

Approaching one of the many gaps in the railing, Brad climbed over the edge of the walkway, panting, and hung over the jeep, dropping down onto the backseat to soften his landing. As he fell, he noticed chains suspended from the underside of the platforms. He jumped from the truck bed onto the wooden floor with a thud. Looking around the room, he saw more chains hanging on the walkways around the room. The other catwalk across the room was in worse condition than the one Brad had arrived on, with more space exposed than not by the broken guardrail.

Making his way across the room to the smaller hold, the voice from behind the boxes grew louder. As he got closer, the voice gradually grew into screaming, and from the few words he could make out it sounded like French. He crept up the set of stairs to the room partition, and he could see the floor of the smaller hold was covered in a few inches of water. There was no way to get through it quietly, so he stepped off the divider with a splash, hoping to get the attention of whoever was there. He wandered up to the boxes, trying to see who it was when something made a swing for him.

He stumbled back a step, and saw it was Olson, the pirate captain, who had swung at him with a heavy sledgehammer in one hand, the distributor cap in the other. 

“Stay back, I mean it!” he shouted at Brad, still flailing the sledgehammer wildly. 

Brad took another step back. “Hey, just relax! We just want to get out of here. Nobody’s gotta get hurt,” he responded nervously.

Olson ignored him, yelling and swinging wildly at him, although he still didn’t wouldn’t get any closer.

“I’ve got to get that cap, or else we’re all screwed!” Brad thought. “This may be our only chance to get out of here. It’s up to me now!” 

He took a breath to steel himself, and rushed at Olson. The pirate captain easily deflected Brad's attack, pushing him away and knocking him over into the shallow water with the handle of the sledgehammer. Olson backed away to the far side of the stacked crates, still yelling into the heavy air. He turned and bolted, running out of the smaller hold into the main room.

"Where's he going?" Brad said, climbing to his feet. He began chasing after Olson to the edge of the hold, but behind him the door to Hold 1 creaked and shuddered. Stopping to look, Brad turned around to find a wave of water poured from the flooded hold, dragging a rebreather-clad Julia with it. As she was swept through the doorway, Julia grabbed hold of it, and she was left clinging to the door as the water raged around her.

Turning back to Olson, Brad saw him running up the collapsed walkway with both the sledgehammer and the distributor cap in hand.

"Wait! Wait!" Brad called out after him, clamoring over the divider between the flooded section and the main hold. Following hot on his tail, he ran across the room after Olson, bolting up the unsteady ramp, and just in time. As Brad reached the overlook, the ground beneath him tilted. Around him the whole ship pitched, and he fell to the ground. Pushing his glasses back up, he glanced behind him and saw the collapsed section of catwalk break all the way free, tumbling down to the floor of the hold. It splashed noisily into the shallow water that now covered the floor of the hold. Turning back, as Brad looked through the guardrail, he noticed two things: Julia, climbing onto the hold divider, now without the rebreather, and the sparking cables along the far wall that were dangling into the water. Thinking to himself, he realized he had to warn Julia to stay out of the water.

“Shit, those are live cables down there!” he shouted down to her, reaching over the railing to point at the wires. She looked at him, then over to the wires, and quickly nodded before taking off to the side of the cargo hold divider, and out of sight. 

“What’s she doing?” he thought worriedly, before turning his thoughts to more pressing matters. “I don’t have time to worry about her, I need that distributor cap!” 

He turned to see Olson standing at the other end of the catwalk, next to the doorway he and Fliss had used to escape the hold earlier in the night. As Olson paced toward him, wielding the sledgehammer in one hand, Brad spotted the distributor cap clutched in the other. 

“This is my chance!” he thought to himself. “I just have to wait for the right opportunity. I can’t let him get close to me, that sledgehammer is really dangerous.”

Now Olson was slowly approaching him, glaring daggers at Brad. Sneaking up through the doorway behind him was Julia, who had somehow found a way up onto the catwalk.

“Crapcrapcrapcrap--” and without thinking he tipped over a heavy barrel, rolling it at him trying to keep as much distance between the two of them as possible. Olson stopped it with his foot, and instead of stepping over it like Brad expected him to, he looked down at it. Then he raised the sledgehammer high above his head, and swung it down, smashing a hole into the side of the barrel. Sparks flew, and oil spilled out of it, flowing over the edge of the catwalk into the electrified water below. A loud bang happened, accompanied by a flash of fire and a wave of pressure as the oil that dripped down into the hold caught fire in an explosive fashion.

Olson yelled as he covered his face with his arms, trying to block out the heavy fumes from the burning oil. Stepping further away from the railing, he walked over to the barrel and kicked it into the hold with another loud explosion as the rest of the fuel ignited. Along the rest of the hold, fire was starting to spread along the walls, creeping up the sides of the ship. 

“This is really bad,” Brad thought, panicked, “We need to get off the ship, I have to get the cap!”

“Oh god, this ship is going to sink!” he yelled, trying to get Olson to listen. Walking closer, Brad forcefully yelled, “We need that distributor cap! Give it to me now!” In response, Olson screamed in a panicked voice, “Get away!” and flailed wildly with the hammer. 

Brad stumbled away from the swing, falling to the ground in his attempt to dodge the attack. He jumped back to his feet as Olson made another approach, but was stopped when Julia revealed herself. 

“Chill, okay?! Chill!” she said in a calming tone. “Nobody needs to get hurt.” 

Olson turned around to face her and said,”Yeah? Well every one of you things stay the fuck away from me! And then maybe no one gets hurt, simple as that!”

Brad was getting frustrated, and he was not going to keep playing this stupid game. “We just need the goddam distributor cap, okay? We can all get off this ship before it sinks in the fucking ocean!”

Olson held up the cap in front of him, and said, “This? This is what you want?” before starting to scream again, incoherently ranting and shouting. Behind him, Julia picked up a piece of loose rebar from the ground, holding it in one hand like a sword. Around them, the smoke was thickening. It was getting harder to breathe, and the fire was climbing up the walls of the hold at an alarming rate. He had to do something.

Brad slowly approached Olson, his eyes on the distributor cap. Speaking loudly, he said, “Can’t you see this whole place is on fire!? We need to get out of here!” Suddenly, Olson jabbed at him with the head of the sledgehammer, too quick to dodge. It hit him in the stomach, and Brad bent over, gasping. He took a few steps back, clutching his stomach. Following Brad’s lead, Julia took over, getting his attention. “Give me the cap! Now!” she shouted, and Olson whirled around to face her. 

Still winded but now upright, Brad thought, “He’s distracted, now’s my chance!” Streaking forward, he reached for it, grabbing at Olson’s hand. However, he was too slow getting the cap back and Olson flailed at Brad with the sledgehammer, knocking him away. Brad flew back and slammed against the wall, stunned from the blow. The cap dropped from his hand and rolled across the floor towards the mangled catwalk railing.

Behind him, Julia raised the rebar and swung it at him in an attempt of her own, but Olson shrugged off the hit and returned the favor, hitting Julia in the side and knocking her to the ground. He advanced toward her, the hammer high above his head. 

“Stop! Don’t do it!” cried Brad, slowly climbing to his feet.

Olson swung downward with tremendous force at Julia, but she rolled out of the way just in time, jumping to her feet while he was off-balance and pushed him back. Still unsteady, Olson stumbled back several steps backward toward a gap in the railing. 

“He’s going to fall!” Brad thought, panicked, and without thinking he bolted toward him, grabbing Olson’s arm as he took another step back and fell off the edge. Olson’s weight dragged him down, but Brad was far enough back that he could stop them from going completely over the edge. Bracing himself along the edge of the catwalk with one hand, Olson dangling from the other, Julia grabbed the back of his shirt and started pulling, helping him get back onto the platform up to safety when out of nowhere, the ship lurched again underneath them. 

With the tipping of the ship, the fragile balancing act the three of them had fell apart, and Olson’s weight pulled him and Brad over the edge of the catwalk. “NO!” Julia cried from behind him as he fell forward into the hold. 

Brad felt weightless as gravity dragged him down, but as if his arms had a mind of their own, they reached out and he felt something solid, grabbing onto it with all his strength. As his momentum swung him back under the catwalk, he realized he had taken hold of one of the chains strung along the underside of the walkway, and was suspended several feet above the electrified water. 

Above him, he heard Julia cry out, “Oh my god, Brad!” She was too far back from the edge to have seen him grab hold of the chain.

He shouted up to her, “I’m okay! I'm stuck down here, reach down so I can get up!” He saw her peering over the edge, then she quickly stuck down her hand for him to grab. Taking one hand off the chain, Brad reached out for her hand, and Julia dragged him up. Releasing the chain, he reached up with his other hand for the rim of the catwalk, slowly pulling himself up. 

As Brad climbed back onto the catwalk, the two of them collapsed to the ground and crawled to the far wall, away from the edge. When Brad looked back, he saw Olson’s body, singeing from the electricity coursing through the water. If it hadn’t been for… whatever had happened, he would have been down there too. Brad shuddered, turning away and resuming his sights on the wall ahead of him. They sat there for a minute in stunned silence as the crackling of the still-burning hold slowly died around them. Julia was the first to break the silence. 

“Oh, holy-- oh that was, that was real close,” she said breathlessly, staring at the edge of the platform. 

“You’re telling me.” He barked out a painful laugh, slowly standing up while leaning against the wall for support. Putting a hand on his side, he thought, “This is going to bruise like there’s no tomorrow.” Although he wasn’t a doctor like his brother, Brad thought the sledgehammer hit probably cracked a rib. 

Straightening up slowly, he asked Julia the next thing on his mind: “What happened to the distributor cap? Did you get it?” She looked down at the ground, and Brad knew it wasn’t good. 

“When the ship tipped and you fell into the hold, I saw it roll over the edge too. It’s gone now. Do we have any other options?” 

They both knew there was nothing else they could do. In a quiet tone, Brad said,” Let’s get out of here.” 

Julia nodded forlornly, and the pair walked through the doorway in silence.

**Author's Note:**

> As the last word faded into the air, the room was filled with an oppressive silence. 
> 
> "Now that was certainly exciting, wasn't it?" The Curator broke the quiet air with his voice. He spoke as simply as ever, "Congratulations to Brad are in order, it seems. He hung in there,tough as ever, even when things got a little heated." Chuckling briefly at his joke, he continued, now more serious. "It's all about decisions, isn't it? Although the two of them seem to have escaped with only minor wounds, there seems to be a bigger problem in their near future. Sometimes, those decisions take a long time to have repercussions. In this go of things, it appears as though the actions they've taken may work out for our hearty crew. Other times, however, our rash impulses may bring us misfortune, pain, and yes, even death. But we should not fear death," he said, his eyes as hard as stone. "It is, after all, inevitable. The toll one pays for living, and coming in its own time to everyone." 
> 
> With those ominous words left hanging in the air, the Curator sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. 
> 
> In an almost inaudible whisper, he muttered, "Almost everyone."


End file.
